51 :: State of the Map : Make maps better, together

So I’m back from crashing the QGIS User Group Meetup and the US State of the Map Conference and I have learned so much and I have so much to say. I started on writing an epic recap on my conference experiences and insights but as that is too daunting, I thought I would write up my experiences as I watch and re-watch the talks of SOTUM14 as they are already up.

There were two streams of talks at any given moment, with groups of two or three talks in similar theme. Since I took part in the beginners workshop on OSM, I missed the opening sessions of the conference. So I caught up on the first talk I missed:

Mike’s talk is a deceptively simple one. His premise is that we have a tendency to choose simple formats over complicated ones, choose open instead of proprietary, and that adding geographic data to github means that we can share, collaborate and make variations of work that the originators may have never imagined.

As I said, his talk was – I felt – was a little too simple. He didn’t talk about how this partnership between OSM and Mapbox came about and he didn’t let on if there was something larger planned for it in the future. When someone asked Mike about geogit, he said that he didn’t know about it. Also, there was no mention of similar projects that allow for collaborative maps to be made and shared, such as Crowdmap, which allows for people to file reports easily without having to know how to fork repos and validate geojson.

That all being said, making maps, together in github is still mighty fine. I just wanted to know more about it.